China instability rising

Warren Rothman, a San Francisco lawyer, was having dinner with a Chinese legal colleague in Shanghai a few years ago, he said, when the colleague “blurted out” that he’d helped pay a $3 million bribe to ensure that his client, an iconic American company, could win a contract to work in China.

Rothman was stunned. He berated his younger colleague, a legal assistant for a Western law firm. He tried to defend himself and “looked very embarrassed,” Rothman recalled. Then within days, Rothman alleges that he found himself trapped in a Kafka-esque nightmare — poisoned, placed in a mental hospital, tortured and tormented in ways that were intended to trigger a fatal stroke to make sure he never revealed what he had learned about the bribe.

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“Why’s it taking so long?” Rothman claimed one of his Chinese torturers mused to another one as he sat drugged, strapped to a chair. But unlike Neil Heywood, the British businessman who died under suspicious circumstances in China last fall, Rothman managed to get away and return to the United States.

“The only difference between me and Neil Heywood,” Rothman said, is that he’s not corrupt, and “I didn’t come home in an urn.”

Rothman supplied emails, documents from the American Consulate in Shanghai and other evidence that largely backed his story. For example Mark McGovern, the acting consular chief in Shanghai, apparently spoke to the legal aide and wrote in a memo, “We understand that Mr. Warren Rothman, a U.S. citizen” is “in need of urgent medical and psychiatric attention,” adding that the legal aide “has an ongoing friendship with Mr. Rothman and is best capable to see to his immediate needs at this time, including hospital admittance and related procedures.”

Rothman’s story may seem hard to believe — until you consider the lengths to which Chinese officials go to silence dissidents and others who threaten to discredit them.

In fact, several China experts said the government routinely flouts its own laws. And one of its favorite tactics is killing its opponents while trying to make the death seem like a suicide, accident or natural death, though until recent times, that tactic had been used only against Chinese dissidents, not Americans and other foreigners.

“It’s pretty unusual,” said John Kamm, executive director of Dui Hua, which means dialogue. Dui Hua is a nonprofit that promotes human rights in China. “I’ve heard of only a few.”

Sophie Beach, executive editor of China Digital Times, said: “There are more cases now of foreign businesspeople being thrown into jail, though maybe not killed.” As for the “forced suicides,” she added, “it’s hard to say that it’s happening more often, but people are finding out about them more often now” because of social media and other online resources.

All of that is part of the larger problem, Kamm added: “the lack of rule of law, the lack of transparency,” the government “acting against its own laws.”